Woody Guthrie: A Life
by Joe Klein
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joe KleinEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-02-09
ISBN: 0385333854
Number of pages: 512
Publisher: Delta
Book Reviews of Woody Guthrie: A Life
Book Review: The real thing
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the most touching stories I've ever read, this biography makes Woody Guthrie come alive as the fabulous, impossible, creative genius he was. In perfectly-tuned, lively prose, Klein covers Guthrie's amazing story, from his childhood in a temporarily well-to-do Southern family whose patriarch was smart and successful until he wasn't. The family fell into deep poverty, the mother succumbed to insanity and was confined to an insane asylum after years of erratic and dangerous behavior, and the children were left to fend for themselves.
Woody Guthrie hit the road as a teenager, and hardly ever settled down, anywhere, thereafter. He was the genuine article, a wandering minstrel chronicling his living experience of the Dust Bowl, the Depression and World War, and all the travails of that time in our nation's history. We see Guthrie's political awakening; and once awakened, he never looked back, never compromised his grass-roots principles, never sold out. How does a person stay that pure when there's money to be made from his talent and popularity, and his children are living in poverty? By being completely uninterested in money--Woody Guthrie seemed to view it as something evil--and by being unconcerned with the way other people see him.
The book is filled with sad and funny anecdotes about Guthrie's uncouth behavior and unwashed presence, causing dear friends and admirers (or their wives) to turn him out of their homes. He was clearly more at home *without* a home, riding the rails with hoboes, sleeping on people's couches, even enjoying the times (several) he spent in jail, where he felt right at home and made friends with inmates and guards alike. In one incident, when he was released just before Christmas, he was irate because he had promised to give a performance there and insisted on returning to sing for the inmates. Another telling anecdote: he was invited to dinner at a friend's home and insisted on eating his dinner standing at the kitchen sink. He just didn't conform to the norms of civilization, yet he seems to have had the most generous heart in the world.
Even when his catastrophic illness forced him to live most of the time in mental hospitals, his overriding interest was the plight of his fellow patients, whose disturbances he observed with compassion.
We read the story knowing all through what the outcome will be; and as the Huntington's chorea takes over more and more of his faculties, we grieve along with those who lived through it with him. A profound question, nicely articulated by the author, is how much of Woody Guthrie's art and lifestyle was shaped by the disease: "It was impossible to say where the disease left off and Woody began." Many of the symptoms coincide with Woody's own quirky rhyming and verbal cadences, his razor-sharp cleverness and silly excesses and uninhibited social behavior, his inability to stay in one place.
So as I was finishing the book, I looked up the music of Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, Leadbelly, and the other folk and blues artists whose stories are told here, and listening to them, I now recognize the difference between "authentic" and "commercial" folk music. It may be that the Kingston Trio and other groups popularized Guthrie's songs, but we wouldn't even know their names had they not had this material to work with. The original balladeers' music is funky, flawed (which adds to its charm), recorded with primitive equipment and often hard to make out, but it's exquisite. It's right there right then. Try listening to "Hobo's Lullaby" without being moved to tears. Or, listen to the music, then read the book, and then listen to the music again right afterward. You'll never hear it the same way again.
Woody Guthrie was complex but simple: kindly and compassionate, childlike and innocent, crude and crazy and bawdy, brilliant, uncivilized, pure, and completely fearless.
Summary of Woody Guthrie: A Life
Before he became Anonymous, author of the political novel Primary Colors, Joe Klein wrote this intelligent biography of America's legendary folksinger-activist. Klein's first book may not have created the fuss that Primary Colors did, but it attracted the attention of no less a celebrity than Bruce Springsteen, who used to cite it with respect during concerts before singing Guthrie's most famous lyric, "This Land Is Your Land." Klein's unearthing of two politically radical verses usually omitted from that song is just one instance of the solid research underpinning his vivid narrative of Guthrie's often tragic life (1912-67). Before Woody turned 15, his sister died in a fire and his mother was committed to an Oklahoma insane asylum with a mysterious disease he later learned he inherited; Klein's chilling description of Huntington's chorea is one of the book's strong points. Its heart is a full rendering of Guthrie's restless wanderings across Depression-era America, which fired his lifelong radicalism, and a scrupulously unsentimental account of Woody's oft-sentimentalized personality. He may have been a genius and a staunch advocate of the common people, but Guthrie was also a bad husband, neglectful father, and difficult friend, as Klein shows. He pays Woody's life and music the tribute of assuming they need no sanitizing, and this biography is all the more interesting because of it. --Wendy SmithComposers & Musicians Books
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